At its third annual conference, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Network for Public Education released a major report on the problems of current test-based teacher evaluation systems. The report includes recommendations for innovative reform.
For Immediate Release: April 17, 2016
Media Contact:
Anthony Cody 510-917-9231, Anthony_cody@hotmail.com
Carol Burris 718-577-3276 cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org
National Report Shows New Teacher Evaluation Systems Causing Harm
“Teachers Talk Back: Educators on the Impact of Teacher Evaluation” is a ground-breaking report that brings forth the voices of those on the front lines, teachers and administrators, to reveal the impact that changes to teacher evaluations are having on our schools, teachers and students.
The Network for Public Education Urges Policymakers and the Public to Remove Evaluations Based on Test Scores and Strengthen Teacher Collaboration.
Raleigh, NC — Today, the Network for Public Education, a national nonprofit education advocacy organization, released Teachers Talk Back: Educators on the Impact of Teacher Evaluation, a report authored by a team of educators from around the country. The team drew on survey responses from nearly 3000 educators from 48 states who shared their firsthand experiences with the new models of teacher evaluation which resulted from Race to the Top. What respondents reported is cause for serious concern. Their observations explain the reports of falling morale and rising rates of teachers leaving the profession.
NPE’s Executive Director, recently retired principal Carol Burris contributed to the report, and said: “Many of us are concerned about the impact we have observed in our schools. This report makes it clear that the problems are systemic, and they are hitting schools across the nation.”
Some of the report’s key findings are:
· Eighty-three percent of respondents report that the use of test scores in teacher evaluations has had a negative effect on instruction.
· Seventy-two percent indicate that the use of test scores has hurt the sharing of instructional strategies among teachers.
· There have been sharp decreases in collaboration and increases in competition among teachers.
· Evaluations are consuming inordinate amounts of time and energy, without benefit.
Jessica Martinez, an Albuquerque teacher who contributed to the report said, “The current evaluation system has eroded and undermined collaborative relationships between teachers by placing teachers in competition against one another by creating a competitive and isolating professional culture.”
Respondents also raised concerns regarding possible bias against veteran teachers and minorities. Given major declines in the number of African American teachers in many major cities, the report recommends further research to investigate the role that test-based evaluations may play. Project facilitator Elaine Romero noted, “This project haunts me recognizing the impact of teacher evaluation on teachers-of-color. Where HAVE all the teachers-of-color gone? How DOES not having their presence, voice, and ideas impact our profession?”
Finally both responding teachers and administrators agree that the use of test scores for evaluation has had terrible consequences for children and teachers alike.
The report offers six recommendations.
· An immediate halt to the use of test scores as any part of teacher evaluation.
· Teacher collaboration should not be tied to evaluation but instead be a teacher- led cooperative process that focuses on their students’ and their own professional learning.
· The observation process should focus on improving instruction—resulting in reflection and dialogue between teacher and observer—the result should be a narrative, not a number.
· Evaluations should require less paperwork and documentation so that more time can be spent on reflection and improvement of instruction.
· An immediate review of the impact that evaluations have had on teachers of color and veteran teachers.
· Teachers should not be “scored” on professional development activities. Nor should professional development be dictated by evaluation scores rather than teacher needs.
NPE President Diane Ravitch said: “Current teacher evaluation programs are so flawed that they are causing an exodus of experienced teachers and a precipitous decline in the number of people who want to become teachers. This report offers research-based recommendations that can fix teacher evaluation so that it helps teachers and improves instruction. Every policymaker should read the report and consider implementation of its sound proposals.”
The full report can be found at: http://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/NPETeacherEvalReport.pdf
About the Network for Public Education
The Network for Public Education (NPE) was founded in 2013 by Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody. We are an advocacy group whose mission is to protect, preserve, promote, and strengthen public schools for both current and future generations of students. For more information, please visit: networkforpubliceducation.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Noel Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
A quantitative evaluation means whatever the evaluator wants it to mean; it is a reflection of the evaluator more than the person who was evaluated.
The higher the stakes we give this evaluation, the more unjust it is.
The same applies to grades.
The use of Marzano and Danielson rubrics in many teacher evaluation models is wasting inordinate amounts of time and energy while producing nothing in return.
The motto of test-based reformers the world over:
“If we broke it, don’t fix it!”
Or is it . . .
“We broke it – You bought it!”
YES: Finding a way to prove a school “broken” and then lucratively invade and ultimately remove it is simply following the throw-away logic of a modern day economics; a logic which has nothing whatsoever to do with actually educating children. http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/throw-away-economics
This survey and report reveal this issues surrounding teacher evaluation today. Rather than considering the merit and performance of individual teachers, current evaluations reflect the politicization of and obsession with test scores. This is not shocking news, but it is news that should be heard by the general public. The trick is trying to get any of the mainstream media to cover the story.
Let us not ignore that part of the teacher evaluation in most regions that involves student learning objectives. It is somehow believed that growth in student learning can and must be quantifiably measure via data and that this somehow reveals who is and is not a good teacher. This most certainly effects what and how teachers are teaching. Reflection on practice is good but teachers do this all the time without a wrongful “how to” manual as is presented to teachers these days! Classroom instruction is impacted by the duration of this “measuring of growth” process. Learning should be allowed to unfold… students should be aware that failure is not a bad thing when one learns to use failure to propel successes. But the “growth measurement” process via “pseudo hard data” stunts this all-important process. This, in addition to testing is extremely detrimental to the classroom learning environment. It is not ALL ABOUT STUDENTS… it is ALL ABOUT SETTING UP TEACHERS TO FAIL or making great teachers “tow the mediocre line” (in other words making them put aside their greatness in the name of following “corporate ed reform” dictates designed to destroy public schools).
Any authentic and valuable teacher evaluation will eliminate metrics entirely.
I’m about ready to leave my classroom on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I’ve spent three hours in here today. The deformers have made my job a 7 days per week job. You just cannot get it all done. I have all of my lessons done for the week, all my papers run off, my Smart Board ready to go……and I’m totally prepared for a great instructional week. I also have a lot of SLO paperwork/grading to complete.
However, here is the bad news:
No matter how well my lessons go this week and how hard I try, I have several students who refuse to work. They slop anything down, and they honestly do not care. I’ve tried everything. Mediocre work is okay in their minds. Some of these kids unfortunately will never graduate high school. Does their bad test scores make me a bad teacher?
Teaching is the only profession that I know of that a teacher can deliver an outstanding product (I work very hard. I’m a very good teacher.), but yet the system will not acknowledge that we delivered a good product until a student performs well on testing. How in the world am I to inspire a student to do well when nothing works? There is zero student or parent accountability in students who do not care.
For all of these reasons, I’m relieved that I am close to retirement. I am exhausted, tired, weary, depressed, and discouraged in being held accountable for variables that I have absolutely no control over. I know that I am not alone in my feelings.
Correction: Do their bad test scores make me a bad teacher? I’m so tired. Forgive me. Have a great week everyone! It is supposed to be beautiful here in Ohio. Blessings!
What has happened is the inevitable outcome of ignoring science and basing policy on ideology that actually flies in the face of science– in this case Neoliberal ideology:
As George Monbiot points out: “Neoliberalism insists that we are defined by competition, and are essentially selfish and acquisitive. This turns out to be a myth: As a paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out, Homo economicus — the neoliberal conception of people as maximizing their own self-interest at the expense of others – is an excellent description of chimpanzees and a very bad description of human beings. We simply don’t work like this. Humans are distinguished from other mammals by an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare and an ability to create moral norms that generalize and enforce these tendencies. These traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate: We have evolved to be this way.”
Neoliberalism is the ideology that is at the basis of our current economic system. It is also what drives people like Bill Gates who don’t know the first thing about actual science. Gates would fit right in a chimpanzee clan.
I don’t think anyone puts it all together as eloquently as Henry Giroux in “Can Democratic Education Survive in a Neoliberal Society?”
“What is truly shocking about the current dismantling and disinvestment in public schooling is that those who advocate such changes are called the new educational reformers. They are not reformers at all. In fact, they are reactionaries and financial mercenaries who are turning teaching into the practice of conformity and creating curricula driven by an anti-intellectual obsession with student test scores, while simultaneously turning students into compliant subjects, increasingly unable to think critically about themselves and their relationship to the larger world. This poisonous virus of repression, conformity and instrumentalism is turning public education into a repressive site of containment, a site devoid of poetry, critical learning and soaring acts of curiosity and imagination. As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, what is driving the current school reform movement is a profoundly anti-intellectual project that promotes “more testing, more privately managed schools, more deregulation, more firing of teachers [and] more school closings.”9 There are no powerful and profound intellectual dramas in this view of schooling, just the muted rush to make schools another source of profit for finance capital with its growing legion of bankers, billionaires and hedge fund scoundrels.”
These piles of crap have knowingly forced an entire profession to lie down repeatedly on their specially ill-designed Procrustean beds. They should all go to prison. Then Hell.
The NPE study is excellent. It is thorough, thoughtful and addresses the concerns that public school teachers are experiencing with the changes in evaluation that have accompanied the imposition of the various reform initiatives. It was not surprising to find that so many teachers are concerned with the negative impact of these simplistic attempts to quantify a process that at its heart involves the most fundamental aspects of human interactions and relationships.
It was refreshing to read the biographies of the contributors and note that all were either experienced teachers and/or actual school administrators rather than the policy wonks with little or no actual experience in education who serve as directors for too many of the groups that are fronts for either political or economic interests bent on “disrupting” public education.
The recommendations are spot on. But In the spirit of “If a tree falls in a forest” . . . if teachers quite rightly rail against these injustices and absurdities, is there anyone to hear them, let alone implement these recommendations.
One quibble, and that is that the photograph on p4 shows a teacher and two students working with chemicals in a science lab-type setting without appropriate PPE – Personal Protective Equipment. They most likely should have been wearing eye protection. The omission does not detract from the overall quality of the analysis. Well done!
My response and my plea.
https://poeticjusticect.com/2016/04/18/a-lone-teacher-talks-back-an-educator-on-the-impact-of-teacher-evaluation/